The Iron Matron

By

Dorothy Rabinowitz

Updated Nov. 14, 2008 12:01 a.m. ET

Back in the festive England of the '60s -- an era of swingers, ministerial sex scandals, and social and religious taboos shattered daily -- a star waited to be born. And born she was when the most visible and influential of the taboo shatterers -- the hitherto respectable and mannerly BBC -- ran afoul of Mary Whitehouse, teacher, devout Christian and happily married mother of three. Appalled at programs that introduced young people, her students among them, to the idea that premarital sex was a good thing, and shocked still more by the lewd material on television, she declared war.

Her remarkable career, chronicled in "Filth," (Masterpiece Contemporary, Sunday, 9-10:30 p.m. ET on PBS -- check local listings) may come as news to most Americans, but in the U.K. she remains a legend. Her influence had been no small factor in speeding the resignation of the BBC's director general -- one cause (among many) having been the broadcast of the otherwise unmemorable Beatles song, "I Am the Walrus," which included a reference to "knickers." Such a woman wasn't destined to fade into oblivion.

ENLARGE

Moral Crusade: Julie Walters as Mary Whitehouse in 'Filth.'
PBS

True, this BBC-produced portrait of her life and crusade begins with dispiritingly familiar drollery that suggests anything but seriousness. The Mrs. Whitehouse of the opening scenes has all the trappings of a stock character. She's the eccentric British matron of many a BBC production -- merry, excessive, exhausting, with a touch, about her, of Hyacinth, the social climbing busybody of the series "Keeping Up Appearances." Clearly, the creators of "Filth" (Amanda Coe, writer, Andy De Emmony, director) had their problems settling down to a comfortable tone for this figure who was, after all, famous entirely for her career on behalf of censorship.

Julie Walters, who portrays her with grand and ebullient sympathy, shows evidence of no similar problems. In short order she transforms the chirrupy Mary Whitehouse of those opening scenes into the steeliest of rebels with a cause. Militant in her disgust and not a little narrow in her grasp of life as it is lived, she becomes all the more bewitching. One scene has her marveling -- while her otherwise endlessly supportive husband, Ernest (Alun Armstrong), rolls his eyes -- that anyone could conceivably derive pleasure from oral sex. It doesn't hurt either that her enemies, as portrayed, are irremediably loathsome, chief among them BBC Director General Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, brother of the novelist Graham Greene. Pompous, vain, overbearing and a crude lecher to boot, Sir Hugh gets no quarter here. The BBC chief with a taste for controversial, nontraditional programming like the satiric series "That Was The Week That Was" emerges a full-blown villain.

He is, thanks to Hugh Bonneville's masterful performance, a riveting presence, and one every bit as determined as the woman he most detests in the world -- Mary Whitehouse. He's determined, above all, that her moralizing, and that of every obscure enemy of progress like her, get no iota of acknowledgment from him or anyone else at his BBC. Still, acknowledge her he does in his perverse way. As it becomes clear that Mrs. Whitehouse is far from an obscure force and becoming less so daily, he adorns his office wall with a nude portrait depicting her with six breasts -- a monstrosity at which he's shown hurling things when enraged. This detail, it appears, is a bit of dramatic license. The actual Sir Hugh got the six-breasted portrait of his nemesis only after his retirement.

Mrs. Whitehouse began her campaign in 1964 against -- in her words -- "the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt that the BBC projected into millions of homes through the television screen." In the film, she sits with family and friends at the beginning of it all, watching a harrowing scene of simulated rape -- one night's entertainment on the BBC. It's one horror too many. "The iron has entered my soul" Mrs. Whitehouse informs the family. Clearly it had, and in this exuberant drama of her crusade, that iron is pure gold.

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There's no such luck for anyone sufficiently determined to sit through "Ricky Gervais: Out of England," a stand-up special airing tomorrow, 9-10 p.m. ET on HBO. There would be reason enough for such determination: It's to Mr. Gervais, and co-creator Stephen Merchant that we owe the pleasures of "The Office," that peerless British original. There's much to be said, too, for Mr. Gervais's recently ended HBO series "Extras," far from peerless though it was.

Mr. Gervais's new comedy special has nothing whatever to recommend it -- other, perhaps, than the skin-crawling curiosity it raises. Not the sort of curiosity that lasts. After his first comic riff on children with cancer, Mr. Gervais moves on to similar comedy targets -- autistic children, Nazis, the Holocaust, and more of the kind. He's not, of course, the first comedian to bet on the points to be scored for outrageousness. What is so striking here is the pure, rambling pathos of this effort, in which Mr. Gervais -- stubby, black clad, swilling compulsively from some can of liquid or other -- strides the stage like a man in a dream, losing heart as he goes, while he clatters on about Nazis and fat people. All in the hope, evidently, that some sentence or other will end up making sense. It doesn't, of course. It's pure nightmare, this dream. The real curiosity here, of course, is how such braying emptiness -- packaged as edgy comedy -- comes to be produced, filmed and put on air in the first place.

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